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Racism is any political or social belief that justifies treating people differently according to their racial origins. In fact, since the adoption of affirmative action policies in many countries to redress historical patterns of discrimination by giving special advantages to people of certain races, ethnicity, gender or other distinguishing characteristic, this definition cannot be taken literally. Racist doctrines have existed in world history since the earliest evidence, and have only been thought of as inherently wrong and scientifically absurd since the second half of the 20th century. There is no reliable scientific evidence at all for any form of inherent inferiority of any racial group, though from time to time apparent evidence emerges. Thus in the 1970s some psychologists claimed to be able to show that certain racial groups, for example blacks in the USA and the Irish, systematically scored less well than other groups in intelligence quotient (IQ) tests. Apart from other unreliabilities in the testing, it is generally accepted that environmental factors, and the possible cultural bias, of such tests can account for any apparent racial differences. In fact, not only is there no evidence of racial inferiority, but the very notion

of racial types is scientifically at best obscure and at worst entire fiction. It is sometimes hard to grasp just how crude the tests used for racial stereotyping in those countries, notably South Africa (see apartheid), which have operated a formal racial segregation policy can be, and how much of the pseudo-science that characterized Hitler's theory of racial types (see anti-Semitism) is still taken seriously. Babies whose parentage is unknown can be characterized into race categories on no more evidence than a microscopic examination of whether a head-hair curls more than `normal' for a white person. There are really two different aspects to racism. One is a theory of innate

differences between racial types which is used or advocated by those who the scale would show as superior in order to justify economic and political inequality. The other, and much more common, is based on cultural differentiation, and simply asserts that people of such and such a background are `different', and should not be allowed equal competition for jobs or other rewards with the indigenous members of the nation's culture. Without doubt

this is still a potent force in the mass cultures of Western societies, and from all available evidence racism of this type is at least as strong in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Why and how particular groups become the targets of racial hatred and

discriminatory behaviour from time to time is unclear. The social science theories that attempt to deal with it, often as a subcategory of a general problem of ethnicity in politics, are unsatisfactory. It is a natural problem forMarxism, as racial groupings seldom fit neatly into the expected lines of class conflict, and the tendency is for Marxists to see racism as a false consciousness deliberately or otherwise implanted into the masses to divert them from seeing their common brotherhood as workers facing the true class enemy. But non-Marxist social scientists have no more convincing an approach, and ultimately tend to assume that racism, as a form of xenophobia, rises from social strains, especially in contexts where there is considerable status-anxiety. The extent of the hatred of others because of surface and visible physical

differences is hard to estimate, but is certainly surprisingly widespread. The idea that there is some natural antipathy between white and non-white, or that only `caucasians' indulge in racist feelings, is palpably false. Much of the caste system in India, for example, rests on the racial distinction between the original Tamil inhabitants and the `Aryan' invaders from the north over 3,000 years ago. The Chinese are often reported to be clearly racist in their attitudes towhites in a way that transcends mere ideological opposition to capitalists. A form of reciprocal racism has developed in some societies where racial minorities discriminated against by whites not only develop a defensive racist intolerance of the oppressors, but also of other minorities. Thus, for example, some American black leaders are openly anti-Semitic.